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O’Reilly Webcast: The Linux Way, and natural selection among distros

Before speaking at OSCON 2013, I gave a webcast version of my talk, and it’s now posted to Youtube (actual talk starting at 4m30s.)

Tenets of the Unix Way

History of Unix and Linux

Modern Linux and how it may diverge from Unix

The Linux Way — What is it?

The most significant change between this talk and the talk I gave six weeks later was that I figured out what the actual conclusion of the talk was:

Just like the Unix philosophies enabled the Unix command-line to develop and evolve more rapidly, the mix-and-match nature of Linux distros enables the Linux OS to also evolve more rapidly.

A distro is essentially its pool of packages, plus a handful of mutually-exclusive choices about how to run things. For example, init system, packaging system, and update frequency. These are intrinsic to the distro’s make-up, its ‘DNA’, and go beyond mutually-installable packages like apps and even desktop environments.

The cool thing is that the packages themselves are not part of a distro’s DNA. A new distro can rise up, change fundamental things about how the OS runs, and not have to fork those packages. Compared to forking more monolithic Unixes like *BSD or OpenSolaris, the barrier to entry for a new distro is relatively low, which is maybe why there are so many!

We now have a ‘gene pool’ of distros making different choices, and natural selection acts on this pool as users pick which distro they will use, and developers pick which to build on. This ensures that the Linux OS’s evolution is ultimately driven by its users. A popular distro can make some unpopular changes, but if it keeps doing so, eventually it will hurt its user base so much that other distros will take its place. This is a very good thing, and the conclusion I was trying to reach at the end of this webcast.